Monday, June 25, 2012

Savage by Willow Rose: Interview & Excerpt

YA Paranormal

The year is 1983. Christian is 22 years old when he leaves his home in Denmark to spend a year in Florida with a very wealthy family and go to med-school. A joyful night out with friends is shattered by an encounter with a savage predator that changes his life forever. Soon he faces challenges he had never expected. A supernatural gift he has no idea how to embrace. A haunting family in the house next door. A spirit-filled girl who seems to carry all the answers. An ancient secret hidden in the swamps of Florida. One life never the same. One love that becomes an obsession. Two destinies that will be forever entangled.

Savage is a young adult title with some language, violence, and sexual situations recommended for ages sixteen and up.

The woman driving gently touched her elegant yellow hair, careful not to
mess it up with her colored nails. She spoke with a strong southern accent and
was incredibly beautiful for her age, which I guessed was more than twice my
age of twenty-two. Her name was Mrs. Kirk. I had just met her at Orlando
Airport for the first time a few minutes before. She was waiting for me holding
a sign with my name, Christian Langaa, printed on it.

The year was 1983 and I had recently finished my third year of med
school at a university in Denmark. I had just left my country of birth for St.
Augustine in Florida.Leaving Denmark
was my father’s idea, really. I guess he thought it was about time I left the
nest, so he called in a favor with an old friend of his, an American eye
surgeon, to take me in and help me get a year at a medical school “over-there.”
I can’t say I was unhappy about it. At that time all kids my age wanted to go
to the States where stone-washed jeans and Michael Jackson came from. His
latest album "Thriller" had just been released and was played on
every radio station all over the world. Like so many else I bought the cassette
and played it again and again on my Walkman. Where I came from anything that
was American was considered hip and cool. That summer before I left, my friends
and I had watched the movie Flashdance
that made ripped sweatshirts popular and
we loved the TV show Dallasand
Dynasty that made everybody wear
increasinglyoversized shoulder pads -
even us guys. We drank lots of Coke and dreamt
of watching MTV, which at that time wasn’t something you could do in Europe yet
and especially not in my small home-country Denmark, where we only had one
national channel on our TV.

The older generation in our country thought we were
indifferent to the times we lived in and didn’t understand us at all. They
named us the “So what-generation” or the “No future-generation” because they
felt like we didn’t care about what went on in the world around us. We weren’t
even rebellious. We didn’t have ideals and dreams about changing the world like
they had back in ’68. Meanwhile they were terrified of the A-bomb, the Cold War
and the communists. While we listened to disco music on our ghetto blasters and
danced electric boogie, they fought with a bad economy and the fear of someone
deciding to push the big red button, dropping the A-bomb and ending the world
as we know it. Not to mention the increasing fear of AIDS that was spreading
among people, commonly referred to as the "Gay-Plague" since it was
believed back then to be an "epidemic of a rare form of cancer triggered
by the lifestyle of some male homosexuals," as the headline said in one
newspaper.

The older generation simply felt like our generation
just didn’t care about anything. And maybe they were right. We weren’t that
concerned about political affairs and foreign threats. Politics simply didn’t
interest us, especially not me. I was fed up with listening to my father talk
about politics and war during my upbringing. I was a dreamer not a fighter. You
can’t be both. Not in my book. And AIDS? Well, I guess we thought we couldn't
get it since it was a disease for the homosexuals. Plus we were in our
twenties. We didn't think we could die at all.

We ran over a bump and I was rudely jolted out of my
reverie.

“Not much,” I answered Mrs. Kirk a little timid. “I know it calls itself
the nation’s oldest city. I know it was here Ponce de León came to look for the
legendary Fountain of Youth. I know the city ofSt.
Augustineis
home to the Fountain of Youth National Archaeological Park, a tribute to the
spot where Ponce de León is traditionally said to have landed. Though there is
no evidence that the fountain located in the park today is the storied fountain
or has any restorative effects, visitors drink the water. The park exhibits
native and colonial artifacts to celebrate St. Augustine'sTimucuanand
Spanish heritage.”

Mrs. Kirk looked at me with a small impressed smile. “Very well, you
have done your homework. Dr. Kirk will be pleased to hear that you have not
come unprepared.”

“My dad gave me a book on Florida to read on the plane. I have a
photographic memory. I remember things easily. It helps me a lot in school.”

I stared out the window at swamps and what seemed to me like
wild-growing brushes and forests. I was desperately hoping to catch a glimpse
of an alligator, an animal I had never seen before and of which I had been told
you could find in pretty much every waterhole in Florida. I was deeply fascinated
by creatures of the wild. By predators of any kind. But as a city boy, I had
only seen them behind their bars at the zoo, never in the wild. By now we had
passed several waterholes and I had still not seen any to my great
disappointment.

It felt like my headband was getting tighter, and I was sweating in my
tight jeans and jacket with shoulder-pads and rolled up sleeves. I took the
jacket off and put it in my lap. Florida was a lot warmer than I had expected
it to be. And a lot more humid, too. I wasn’t used to this kind of heat, coming
from a country where we would be lucky to have three weeks of summer. I still
remember the feeling when I stepped out of the airplane in Orlando airport for
the first time. It felt like someone had taken a winter jacket and swept me in
it. Like the air itself was hugging me and welcoming me home. I remember
sweating just from walking from the airport to the big black Mercedes that Mrs.
Kirk picked me up in.

She cranked up the air conditioning and I soon felt a little cooler. I
touched the nice leather seats and suddenly felt so insignificant. Coming from
a rich family by Danish standards I was used to some luxury, yet I had never
been in a car like this.

“Well, maybe you will have to
think about losing some of those unruly curls once you become a doctor,” Mrs.
Kirk said.

I touched my hair gently. I liked my blond curls and had let them grow
past my ears. And I wasn’t the only one who liked them. The girls did too.
Along with my deep-set blue eyes, my curls were my finest feature. Why parents
and others older than thirty-five insisted they want me to cut them off was
beyond me. My dad was the worst. “You look like a savage,” he would say. But I
didn’t care. Deciding what I was going to do for a living was one thing, but he
wasn’t going to change the way I looked, too.

He was the one who wanted me to go to med school, not
me. All I wanted to do was play my acoustic guitar. “But you can’t make a
living out of just playing the guitar. You need to grow up, Chris. It is about time,”
my father said just before he told me about his plans for me. It wasn’t like he
gave me a choice. I was going to take over the family practice. It had always
been his dream for me ever since I was a child, so I never questioned it,
simply because it would break his heart. I never said no to my father in these
matters and I didn't argue when he told me he was going to send me away for a
year, either. Instead, I decided to make the best of it.

Welcome Willow. Thanks for stopping by today. I'm looking foreward to finding out a little more about you and your book. How did you start your writing career?

I have always told stories. I remember telling stories to my friends as a child in school and making them forget that they had to go out and play for recess. Even my teacher would listen in and he told me to keep it up and to write them down. I wrote several notebooks filled with stories that he read. He encouraged me a lot. I went on to become a journalist and wrote my first novel when I was 28. It was published by one of the big Danish publishing houses.

Tell us about your current release.

In Savage we meet Christian who is a young man torn between the world of science and the world of magic. He has left his country of Denmark and is going to Florida to go to med school. He meets Aiyana who is a spirit-filled girl living in a completely different world than he is. Her family is descendants from the Timucua Indians that lived in Florida before the Spaniards came. They live in a world of magic, music and laughter and Christian feels so drawn to them.At the same time he has a violent encounter with a savage beast in the swamps of Florida, an encounter that makes him doubt everything he has always believed.

When in the day/night do you write? How long per day?

I say goodbye to the kids at nine and then I write until three o'clock when they are out of school. I try to leave the computer alone the rest of the day in order to be there for the kids, but sometimes I just have to sneak back to it and write something that I just remembered. It's really hard not to write constantly once I have begun a new book.

Do you listen to music while writing? If so what?

I have a thing for James Blunt. I always listen to him when I write. Never when I am not writing. It is weird. There is something about the intensity in his lyrics that makes me want to write.

What was the scariest moment of your life?

New Years Eve 2011. We were back in Denmark to visit the family when my husband took the kids outside to watch the fireworks. He was hit in the right eye by a rocket. He lost the eye but nothing else happened. He was lucky the doctors said. If it had hit the brain he could have been killed. If it had hit any of the kids it would have killed them. That was one scary night when he was at the operating table. I was afraid I would lose him. Luckily he is fine today and lives a normal life with just one eye.

How do you develop your plots and your characters? Do you use any set formula?

The story and the characters come to me. I like to say that they "pop up" in my head. That is the best way I can describe it. The characters are just there all of a sudden and then they start to do stuff and talk to other people and soon there is a whole story that I simply have to tell or else I will burst. I simply adore the characters from Savage and I know everybody else will too. They are so lovable. I have a hard time letting go of them. I will write three books about the main character Christian. It is sort of a family-saga really. In the first book he is in his twenties and so is the woman he falls in love with. In the second book they have kids of their own and are in their thirties. In the last book they will have young teenagers. I am also planning on doing a book about Aiyana, the spirit-filled Native American girl that he falls hopelessly in love with. About her and when she first discovers who she really is. I might also do a book about her sister who does telekinesis and their grand-mother who predicts natural disasters. I love those characters so much that they each deserve their own book.

Are the names of the characters in your novels important? How and why?

A lot of my characters are descendants from the Timucua Indians that lived in Florida before the Europeans came so they have Native American names. Each name has a meaning. Like the woman that Christian falls in love with. Her name is Aiyana which means "Eternal blossom".

Willow Rose writes YA Paranormal Romance and fantasy. Originally from Denmark she now lives on Florida’s Space Coast with her husband and two daughters. She is a huge fan of Anne Rice and Isabel Allende. When she is not writing or reading she enjoys to watch the dolphins play in the waves of the Atlantic Ocean.

Other Books by the author:- One, Two ... He is coming for you- The eye of the Crystal ball- Beyond - Afterlife #1- Serenity - Afterlife #2- Endurance - Afterlife #3

Your firework story gave me the shivers! I can't imagine how traumatizing that must have been for everyone who was there! What a tragedy, but you are right - it could have been worse. Thank goodness eyes come in pairs and that his other one is just fine.

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